I think most of us are familiar with the way APT, the package management tool which unpins Ubuntu and all other Debian-based Linux distributions, looks and behaves.
But things are changing.
A substantial set of visual tweaks are planned for the next stable release, APT 3.0, due for release later this year — and they look great.
Hey, don’t pretend you’re not excited by fancier looking APT print outs, my friend! ;)
One of the (many) things I love about Fedora is how clean, ordered, and legible DNF printout looks — no, I’m not sure “printout” is the right term for what I mean but saying it makes me feel like I’m part of the 1980s BBC TV series The Computer Programme so I’m rolling with it for vibes.
Whether I’m checking for updates, removing an app, or just upgrading packages Fedora’s DNF leaves me feeling more aware of what’s happening (or about to happen) than in APT does.
It’s not that APT’s output lacks anything I just don’t find this (below) very glanceable:
APT requires me to read what’s on screen. In 2024 that’s a positively archaic ask (yes, sarcasm).
Indeed, I fell foul of the dense readout during the noble cycle. Ubuntu developers made major package transitions and rebuilds that led to a mix/mess of versions and package conflicts. In those throes running apt upgrade sans attention left me without a desktop to log in to!
Of course, apt told me all of that information but it was hard to glean. Text is the same colour (white); all lines are stacked together densely; the “packages to be removed” section was further up the screen (out of view) than the “packages to be upgraded” section.
So I glibly assumed everything was fine, hit y to proceed and… Well, c’est la ffs 🤦🏻♂️.
The APT 3.0 UI revamp addresses many of those ‘flaws’. Even if you haven’t been stung by an inattentive upgrade snafu I’m sure you can agree this (below) is a BIG improvement: –
Per the release announcement for the APT 2.9 dev release, the package manager UI now has “colors, columnar display, some more padding, and shows removals last” — changes which will spare inattentive impulsive command bashers like moi a rouge-faced post-reboot meltdown!
No idea why I’m mangling the French language so badly in this post, btw. Maybe someone should run sudo apt purge joey-langpack-fr— just pay attention if it tries to remove anything else. Like what remains of my wit ;)
The UI changes close a bug report first opened in 2014 — a decade in the making!
Keep an eye out for this attractive new APT this when Ubuntu 24.10 rolls out in the autumn. Assuming the schedules are lined up correctly in my head APT 3.0 should be released in enough time to make it in — a headline addition, I’m sure!
If you’re dying to try things out not you could do what I did: install Debian Bookworm, edit the sources.list to point to unstable, upgrade apt, and then run lots of different commands to see how things now look.
I have too much time on my hands, I know.